On a data science sabbatical in NYC - and beyond

Mapping the Belgian baby name space

I’ve been working — well, playing — with network visualization tools like Gephi or yEd for a couple of years now.
But for confidentiality reasons, none of this work could be openly shared.

As it happens, yesterday afternoon, with a cosy cup of coffee and an even cosier piece of ricetart at my favorite Pain Quotidien,
I downloaded the full list of first names given to babies born in Belgium over the last 20 years. And wondered how this data set could be turned into a network.

After a moderately short labor of 134 lines of program code — including quite a number of fruitful multiplications — two orthographic word similarity networks were born. In layman’s language: similarly looking names are linked, and therefore visualized close(r) to one another.